Speaker
Description
It was recently pointed out that very energetic subclasses of supernovae (SNe), like hypernovae and superluminous SNe, might host ultra-strong magnetic fields in their core.
Such fields may catalyze the production of feebly interacting particles substantially, changing the predicted emission rates.
Here we consider the case of axion-like particles (ALPs) and show that the predicted large scale magnetic fields in the core contribute significantly to the ALP production, via a coherent conversion of thermal photons.
Using recent state-of-the art SN simulations including magnetohydrodynamics, we find that if the ALPs have masses $m_a \sim {\mathcal O}(10)\, \rm MeV$, their emissivity via magnetic conversions is over two order of magnitude
larger than previously estimated. Moreover, the
radiative decays of these
massive ALPs
would lead to
peculiar delays in the arrival times of the daughter
photons. Therefore, high-statistics gamma-ray satellites can potentially discover MeV ALPs in an unprobed region of the parameter space and shed light on the magnetohydrodinamical nature of the SN explosion.
